Ivan Pavlov

Ivan Petrovich Pavlov (Russian: Иван Петрович Павлов) 9September 14 1849 – February 27 1936) was a Russian physiologist, psychologist, and physician. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1904 for research pertaining to the digestive system. Pavlov is widely known for first describing the phenomenon of classical conditioning.

Life

Ivan Petrovich Pavlov was born in Ryazan, Russia on September 14, 1849. His father, Petr Dmitrievich Pavlov, was one of Ryazan's most respected clergymen. For the previous six generations, the Pavlov men had served Russian Eastern Orthodox Church. Consequently, it was expected that Pavlov would become a Seminarian. In his early years, Pavlov attended the Church school and began his higher education at the Ryazan Theological Seminary, which he graduated from in 1869. After reading the writings of Russian physiologist I.M. Sechenov, The Origin of Species by Charles Darwin, and stimulated by the ideas D.I. Pisarev, Pavlov abandoned his religious career to become a man of science.

In 1870, Pavlov enrolled in the Natural Sciences program at the University of Saint Petersburg where he studied physiology and chemistry under Dimitri Mendeleyev. By 1875, he graduated from the University of Saint Petersburg and in 1876 began his studies in medicine at the Military-Medical Academy which he graduated from in 1879.

In 1881, Pavlov married Seraphima (Sara) Vasilievna Karchevskaya. Seraphima suffered from a miscarriage, their son named Wirchik died unexpectedly as a young child, another son, Vsevolod, died in 1935, and Victor died in the White Army. The death of his children affected him profoundly, after the death of Victor, Pavlov who once followed a strict schedule began to suffer from insomnia. Despite these tragedies, they had two children survive, one son and one daughter, Vladimir and Vera.

In 1883, he recieved his received a Doctor of Medicine degree from the Imperial Medical Academy and submitted his doctoral thesis entitled The Centrifugal Nerves of the Heart. A year later in 1884, Pavlov was appointed Lecturer in Physiology at the Military-Medical Academy. By 1891, Pavlov became the Director of the Department of Physiology at the Institute of Experimental Medicine. From 1891 to 1900, Pavlov did the majority of his research on the physiology of digestion. In 1897, Pavlov published Lectures on the Funtions of the Principal Digestive Glands. It was in 1889, that Pavlov surgically altered a dog's digestive system so that it would eat, but the food would not reach its stomach. He observed that even in the absence of food, the stomach excreted gastric fluids.

Then in 1904, Ivan Pavlov received the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his accomplishments on the physiology of digestive glands. However, a year earlier, in 1903, Pavlov began his famous research on the reflex reactions of animals.

By 1907, he was elected as the Academician of the Russian Academy of Sciences and was given an honorary doctorate from Cambridge University in 1912. Pavlov and his research thrived within the communist Soviet government, as some government officials perceived his research as possibly being invaluable for brainwashing. However, Pavlov vehemently opposed those areas of research and application. Despite this, however, Pavlov continued to praise the government for its support of scientific research. But even this praise ceased after Pavlov returned from his first visit to the United States in 1923. Pavlov then began to publicly denounce Communism. He stated that the basis for international Marxism was false, and said that "For the kind of social experiment that you are making, I would not sacrifice a frog's hind legs!"

In 1924, when the sons of priests were expelled from the Military Medical Academy in Leningrad (the former Imperial Medical Academy), he resigned his chair of physiology announcing, "I also am the son of a priest, and if you expel the others I will go too!" [3] After the murder of Sergei Kirov in 1934, Pavlov wrote several letters to Molotov criticizing the mass persecutions and subsequently demanded the clarification of cases pertaining to several people he knew personally.

Pavlov's reprimands of the government did not censure his research and in 1935, the Soviet Government built a laboratory for Pavlov. The next year, in February 1936, at the age of 86, Ivan Petrovich Pavlov died in Leningrad.

Work

Pavlov’s Dog, Pavlov Museum, 2005

In the 1890s, Pavlov investigated the gastric function of dogs by externalizing a salivary gland so he could collect, measure, and analyze the saliva produced in response to food under different conditions. He noticed that the dogs tended to salivate before the food was actually delivered to their mouths. Intrigued by this he set out to investigate this "psychic secretion", as he called it.

Pavlov was a sagacious operator who kept a strict schedule of his working hours and habits. It is even said that he would leave Leningrad for Estonia on vacation on the same day each year. Supposedly his behavior changed when his son Victor died in the White Army, after which he suffered from insomnia.

Soon after he began to carry out a long series of experiments wherein he manipulated various stimuli that occurred before the presentation of food. It is popularly believed that Pavlov always signaled the occurrence of food by ringing a bell. However, his writings indicate that the use of a wide variety of auditory stimuli, including whistles, metronomes, tuning forks, in addition to a range of visual stimuli were used.

He thereby established the basic laws for what he called "conditional reflexes" that became 'conditional' once a pairing of an conditioned stimulus (referred to as a CS) and and conditioned response (referred to as a CR) became evident.

Later in his life he became particularly interested in trying to modify conditioning to establish an experimental model of the induction of abnormal tendencies. His laboratory in Saint Petersburg has been carefully preserved.

Legacy

Pavlov's term "conditional reflex" ("условный рефлекс") was mistranslated from the Russian as "conditioned reflex", and other scientists reading his work concluded that since such reflexes were conditioned, they must be produced by the process of conditioning. As Pavlov's work became known in the West, particularly through the writings of John B. Watson, the idea of "conditioning" as an automatic form of learning became a key concept in the development of comparative psychology and of the foundation of the psychological approach known as behaviorism.

Pavlov's discoveries have had a deep, acute impact on both of the disciplines of psychology and medicine. Pavlov had the ability to take his findings and apply them to the external world by advising psychiatrist that their patients would be more suited in a quiet environment with few stimuli in order to decrease the likelihood of outbreaks caused by conditioned reflexes.

Pavlov's research on conditional reflexes has also greatly influenced not only science, but popular culture as well. The phrase "Pavlov's dog" is often used to describe someone who merely reacts to a situation and fails to use critical thinking. Pavlovian conditioning was also a major theme in Aldous Huxley's dystopian novel, Brave New World.

Publications

Pavlov, I. P. (1927). Conditioned Reflexes: An Investigation of the Physiological Activity of the Cerebral Cortex. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.

Pavlov, I.P. (1928). Lectures on Conditioned Reflexes: Twenty-five Years of Objective Study of the High Nervous Activity (Behavior) of Animals. Translated by W. Horsley Gantt. New York: International.

Pavlov, I.P. (1994). Psychopathology and Psychiatry. Translated by D. Myshene and S. Belsky. New Jersey: Transaction.

Pavlov, I.P. (1902). The Work of the Disgestive Glands. Translated by W.H. Thompson. London: Griffin.

References
ISBN links support NWE through referral fees

Boakes, R. A. (1984). From Darwin to behaviourism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Firkin, B. G. & Whitworth, J. A. (1987). Dictionary of Medical Eponyms. Parthenon Publishing. ISBN 1-85070-333-7
Pavlov, I. P. (1927). Conditioned Reflexes: An Investigation of the Physiological Activity of the Cerebral Cortex. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.
Tiner, John Hudson. (2000). 100 Scientists Who Shaped World History. Bluewood Books.
Todes, D. P. (1997). Pavlov's Physiological Factory. Isis. Vol. 88. The History of Science Society, p. 205-246.
Todes, Daniel.(2000). Ivan Pavlov: Exploring the Animal Machine. Oxford University Press.

External links

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